Almost a year after Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning massively multiplayer RPG was released — and about six months since the last of the utterly ignorant complaints about the game’s mythos being a “rip off of World of Warcraft were last heard — Mythic have finally completed a project to bring WAR to the desktops of Mac users, potentially doubling the audience of their fun but unfortunately less-than-runaway MMORPG.

Starting now, players can go over to Mythic Entertainment’s official webste and download the official beta of the game, which is scheduled to be officially released in the fall of 2009. Mythic promises that “players from both platforms will be able to battle and quest together on the same servers,” and there’s a trial option for new players interested in getting their feet wet for ten days before taking the plunge.

Unfortunately, the system requirements are beefy: an Intel Core Duo Processor, 2 GBs of RAM, and at least an ATI X1600 with 128MB of RAM are required, and those are the minimum. That’s a lot higher than the PC port, and the culprit is that it isn’t a true port, but instead wrapped in the Cider Portability Engine from Transgaming.

What’s fascinating is that, apparently, to even run WAR on the Mac under Cider, Mythic needed to totally rewrite how the game handles its texturing system, significantly optimizing it. That change is being rolled back to the PC version, so for PC WAR players, you can look forward to a gift from the Mac community: better performance of WAR on your existing rigs. I love games that get more spec efficient as time goes on.

If you are interested in the WAR Mac beta, it’s available for download now.

Reader Comments

Derek

*Obligatory “Now they can port it to Linux” comment. ;-)

Seriously, though, the more platforms a game is available on the better. Speaking as a PC and Mac user (I build my PC rig myself but buy Mac laptops, and lightning hasn’t struck yet!), I think that this is good news indeed. It always frustrates me when a cool new game comes out, and I have to decide between playing it on my PC desktop only, or dual-booting to WinXP to make it portable (for me). Really, since I end up using my laptop more, Mac native (or even semi-native, with Cider) is always preferable. If I’m browsing the web (usually a laptop activity), then decide to game for awhile, having to reboot to play a certain game always makes me less likely to play it and more likely to play one that’s already on the same OS.

On the other hand. . . everyone I know who tried WAR quit before their first month was up, so. . . I probably won’t be trying this particular port. Still, kudos to Mythic for trying!